DublinIrish Dubh Linn, or Norse Dyfflin (“Black Pool”), also called Baile Átha Cliath (“Town of the Ford of the Hurdle”)city and capital of Ireland. Located in the province of Leinster in the east-central part of the country at the head of Dublin Bay on the Irish Sea, the city is the country’s chief port, centre of financial and commercial power, and seat of culture. It is also a city of contrasts, maintaining an uneasy relationship between reminders of earlier political and economic conditions and symbols of present-day life and prosperity. Area city, 45.5 square miles (118 square km). Pop. (2006 prelim.) city, 505,739; Greater Dublin, 1,186,159.

Character of the city

Dublin is a warm and welcoming city, known for the friendliness of its people and famous for its craic (or “crack”)—that mixture of repartee, humour, intelligence, and acerbic and deflating insight that has attracted writers, intellectuals, and visitors for centuries. It has faded grandeur and a comfortably worn sense. Some one-fourth of the residents of the Republic of Ireland live in the Greater Dublin urban area, providing a good deal of bustle. The city’s heart is divided north-south by the River Liffey, with O’Connell’s Bridge connecting the two parts. Pubs (where much of the city’s social life is conducted), cafés, and restaurants abound, and Irish musicality rarely allows silence. On the north side, near the General Post Office, stand most of the remaining Georgian houses, built in the 18th century around squares, now side by side with glass and concrete offices and apartment blocks. Some of the finest monumental buildings stand on the north riverbank, as do the city’s poorest parts, maintaining a curious juxtaposition between reminders of earlier political and economic conditions, aristocratic and impoverished, and manifestations of present-day life and prosperity. Ireland’s national theatre, the Abbey, is just east of O’Connell Street, marked since 2002 by the Spire of Dublin, a 394-foot (120-metre) stainless steel landmark that proclaimed the street’s transformation with a pedestrian plaza and tree-lined boulevard. Together with a rash of new high-rise buildings, the spire has changed the character of the city and of the north side. Though Dublin has undergone modernization, and some areas—such as the narrow and winding streets of the Temple Bar district west of Trinity College—regularly play host to rowdy and raucous crowds, a strong sense of history and of a centuries-old capital pervades.

Landscape

City site

Dublin’s geographic site is superb. Situated at the head of a beautiful bay, the city straddles the River Liffey where it breaks eastward through a hill-ringed plain to the shores of the Irish Sea. (The dark bog water draining into the river made the “black pool” that gave the city its name.) Almost certainly, this opening from the sea—leading through the mountains to the fruitful central plains of Ireland—originally attracted Viking raiders and Norse settlement. Each year the suburbs jut farther into the countryside, but to the south there is a natural limit posed by the Dublin and Wicklow mountains, which ring the city and provide some of its most beautiful vistas.

Climate

Dublin enjoys a maritime temperate climate. The average temperature is lowest in January–February, 42 °F (6 °C), and highest in July–August, peaking at about 68 °F (20 °C). Most sunshine is in May and June and averages four hours a day. The mean annual rainfall is 30–40 inches (760–1,000 mm), although more falls in the surrounding mountains. There are fewer than 10 days of snow per year.

The city layout

Apart from the port area and the docks, Dublin is a low-built, steepled city, with few buildings dating from before the 17th century. The Roman Catholic churches are 19th- and 20th-century structures. The 17-story Liberty Hall (built 1961–65 as a trade-union headquarters), long Dublin’s tallest building, has been joined by a spate of new high-rise offices and apartments. Still, most of the buildings are no higher than 5 or 6 stories.

The three elements that constitute the architectural legacy of Dublin—Norse, Norman, and Georgian—all meet in Dublin Castle. In the first two decades of the 13th century, the Normans obliterated the Norse stronghold and raised a château-fort. When the Georgians built the present red-brick castle, they left two towers of the old structure standing. The castle—the seat of British authority in Ireland until 1922—is now used for ceremonial occasions, especially the inauguration of the republic’s presidents, who reside at Áras an Uachtaráin (“the President’s House,” formerly the Viceregal Lodge) in Phoenix Park, and for local and international conferences. The castle also is the home of a number of cultural organizations, notably the Chester Beatty Library.

Close to the castle a Norse king of Dublin built Christ Church Cathedral (c. 1030), which was replaced about 140 years later by a more magnificent Norman structure. By the 19th century the edifice was in ramshackle condition; it was restored in the 1870s at enormous cost. Its neighbour, St. Patrick’s, erected just outside the city walls, was also originally a Norse church that may have been built on an earlier Celtic foundation. Rebuilt by the Normans in 1191, it was enlarged and partially rebuilt over the centuries. It was in a state of collapse when Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness, the brewing magnate and a lord mayor of Dublin, financed its restoration in the mid-19th century. Christ Church is the cathedral for the diocese of Dublin and Glendalough, whereas St. Patrick’s, unusually, is not the seat of a bishop. Both have been Church of Ireland (Anglican) churches since the Reformation. In 1949 the funeral of Douglas Hyde, the first president of the Republic of Ireland, was held at St. Patrick’s. Because of the Roman Catholic Church’s prohibition of its members’ attending Protestant services, the whole Irish government, apart from its two Anglican members, attended in the foyer of the cathedral. The Pro (for Provisional) Cathedral on Marlborough Street, to the east of O’Connell Street on the north side, is the principal Roman Catholic church. It was completed in 1825 and is the seat of the archbishop of Dublin and primate of Ireland.

The area between St. Patrick’s and the Guinness Brewery on the Liffey is known as the Liberties, located outside the old city walls and so named because it was subject to private jurisdiction and not to the king or the town. In the years after World War II, large tracts of this district were cleared for low-cost housing.

Dublin’s early private speculators had a sense of order and beauty as acute as their sense of profit. The city’s streets were broad and its garden squares spacious. For their time (the 18th century), the houses were ultramodern—elegant yet simple Georgian and Neoclassical structures designed in the manner of the great English architects Inigo Jones and Sir Christopher Wren. The sweeps of red-brick houses, ranged in squares and long terraces and built with well-proportioned windows, made a harmonious whole that still stands as a happy achievement of urban architecture.

In the southern half of the town, between Trinity College and St. Stephen’s Green, Joshua Dawson, one of Dublin’s leading citizens, built an impressive house that was completed in 1710. The city soon bought the house to serve as residence of the lord mayor, and, as the Mansion House, it still does. The first Irish republican parliament, the Dáil Éireann, met there in 1919.

Dawson’s neighbours, the equally prominent Molesworths, followed his example and began building houses and entire streets. In 1745–48 the earl of Kildare erected a palace at the end of Molesworth Street; Kildare House, renamed Leinster House when the earl became the duke of Leinster, is thought to have been the model for the White House in Washington, D.C. It is now the seat of the republic’s parliament (Oireachtas). Twin Victorian buildings, which were constructed on either side of Leinster House in the 1880s, contain the National Library and the National Museum of Ireland. Merrion, immediately to the east, and Fitzwilliam, to the south, are two of the great 18th-century squares.

The oldest and largest of the city’s squares is St. Stephen’s Green, recorded in 1224 as common grazing land but enclosed and bordered with houses in the 1660s. Most of the imposing mansions now surrounding it were built in the 18th century. By 1887 the parkland was run down, and the Guinness family, whose former residence on the south side now houses the Department of Foreign Affairs, paid for its rehabilitation.

The city’s north-south axis runs from the western side of St. Stephen’s Green down Grafton Street and through College Green to the Liffey, across O’Connell Bridge to the river’s northern bank, and then along O’Connell Street to Parnell Square. Grafton Street, long Dublin’s premier shopping district, was made pedestrian-only in the 1990s, and it has become a lively thoroughfare hosting street entertainers. It emerges onto College Green between the University of Dublin (Trinity College) and the 1729 Parliament House, which is now the privately run Bank of Ireland’s headquarters.

Along the Liffey’s northern quays stand James Gandon’s Neoclassical masterpieces of the Custom House (1781–91) and the Four Courts (1786–1802). The Custom House was burned out in 1921 by republicans who wished to destroy administrative records; the Four Courts was ruined by shellfire and mines at the outbreak of civil war in June 1922. Both have since been rebuilt.

O’Connell Street—first called Drogheda and then Sackville Street—is a stretch of shops, cinemas, and snack bars. The only building of any distinction to survive the warfare that swept the street in 1916 and again in 1922 was the General Post Office, seized as headquarters of the 1916 rebellion. Badly damaged, it was reconstructed behind its surviving 1815 classical facade in 1929. Opposite the post office stood Nelson’s Pillar, a landmark for generations of Dubliners. Built in 1808, it was mysteriously blown up late one night in 1966. At the beginning of the 21st century, Dublin Corporation (now Dublin City Council) began upgrading both the street and its shops, cutting down the century-old London plane trees that lined the centre and erecting the Spire.

At the top of O’Connell Street, Bartholomew Mosse constructed his Rotunda Hospital, the “Lying-In,” which remains a maternity hospital to this day. The rotunda itself is now the historic Gate Theatre. Behind the hospital is Parnell (formerly Rutland) Square, laid out in 1750, with many of its original Georgian houses still intact. One of these, built for the earl of Charlemont in 1762–65, now houses the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art.

The 18th-century city commissioners circumscribed the growing city with the North and South Circular roads. Synge Street, close to the South Circular Road, was the birthplace of the dramatist George Bernard Shaw. The Grand Canal was constructed to the north and the Royal Canal to the south of these peripheral roads; both canals enter the Liffey at the harbour entrance and both connect with the River Shannon. Only the Grand is now navigable.

Dublin’s Phoenix Park is Europe’s largest enclosed urban park. It is roughly ovoid in shape, with a land perimeter of 7 miles (11 km), and is situated on the north bank of the Liffey, about 2 miles (3 km) west of the city centre. In September 1979, during the first visit by a reigning pontiff to Ireland, the religious service conducted by Pope John Paul II in the park attracted an estimated 1.25 million people, the largest gathering ever recorded in the country. Duels took place in the park, and in 1882 it was the scene of an assassination that involved the stabbing of the British chief secretary of Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and his undersecretary, T.H. Burke (see Phoenix Park murders). Initially a royal deer park, Phoenix Park was opened to the public in 1747. Its zoo, celebrated for lion breeding, opened in 1831 and effectively doubled its size in 2001 when the African Plains section opened on land donated by the president of Ireland from the presidency’s official holdings. The 205-foot (62-metre) Wellington Monument is at the southeast end of the park, commemorating Arthur Wellesley, 1st duke of Wellington. Nearby is Islandbridge, the site of World War I memorial gardens designed by Sir Edwin Luytens.

People

Demography

During the second half of the 20th century, the population of Dublin and the surrounding area grew annually by about 1 percent, the same rate as the country generally. Initially the trend in migration was from the countryside to the city. During the last quarter of the 20th century, however, central city areas began to lose population, while new suburbs southwest and north of Dublin grew. Urban regeneration at the end of the 20th century attracted new dwellers to the inner city.

Religion

The administrative bodies of Ireland’s main religious groups are based in Dublin. The city, in common with the rest of the country, is overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, though Dublin remains the most religiously diverse part of Ireland. The non-Catholic population steadily declined after 1922, but censuses in the early 21st century showed a marked increase in the number of Protestants and Muslims living in the city. Evangelical and charismatic Christian groups began growing in the 1970s, and together with immigration this has increased diversity. The number of Dubliners professing no religion, especially among the young, has also increased.

Economy

Manufacturing

Dublin’s major traditional industries—brewing (the Guinness Brewery has operated at St. James’s Gate since 1759), distilling, food processing, and textile manufacturing—have all declined since the 1970s, resulting in inner-city blight. The recession of the 1980s brought a slump in the building trades. Several industrial estates, however, were built in the suburbs around the city and, with the help of government grants and general economic improvement in the 1990s, attracted new enterprises, notably information technology, electronics, chemicals, engineering, and financial services firms.

Finance and other services

Dublin is the headquarters for Ireland’s chief financial and commercial institutions. The economic pace has quickened markedly since 1973, when the country joined the European Economic Community (EEC; in 1993 renamed later succeeded by the European Community and embedded in the European Union [EU]). In addition to the major clearing banks, all of which have their main offices in Dublin, there has been a rapid increase in the number of other banks, principally from EU countries. The Irish Stock Exchange, an integral part of the British Stock Exchange system, is also located in central Dublin and is one of the oldest such markets in the world, trading continuously since 1793.

Traffic through the port of Dublin has grown steadily since the 1990s. In 1987 the International Financial Services Centre was established in the former northern dock area, under the Custom House Development Authority. This venture reflected the country’s commitment to the single European market, with its attendant abolition of duties and tariffs within the EU. It began the regeneration of the docks as a flourishing business and residential area. Millions of tourists flock to Dublin annually, and the city has responded with new hotels, events, activities, and transport systems.

Transportation

The city council has prime responsibility for traffic management in Dublin. Major roads are a national responsibility, but this inevitably has a great effect on the capital. The Dublin Port Tunnel, Ireland’s largest civil engineering project, opened in 2006 and links the port to the national motorway network. The Dublin Area Rapid Transit (DART) train service runs along the coast from Malahide and Howth in County Fingal to Greystones, County Wicklow, in the south. A tram system from St. Stephen’s Green in the centre of the city began operating in 2004. Connolly and Heuston are the capital’s two railway stations; Connolly serves the north and northwest, Heuston the south, southwest, and west. Irish Railways (Iarnród Éireann), a subsidiary of Córas Iompair Éireann (CIE), the national transport company, provides suburban services and intercity connections with the rest of the country and Northern Ireland. City bus services provide extensive service. Dublin’s international airport is just north of the city at Collinstown.

Administration and society

National and local government

Dublin is the headquarters for government departments, their advisory committees, and associated agencies. The two houses of the Irish parliament, the Dáil and the Seanad (Senate), meet at Leinster House. The judiciary is based at the Four Courts. More than 40 countries maintain embassies, and several others are represented by consuls, both honorary and professional.

The Dáil abolished the county of Dublin in 1994, substituting the Dublin Region of three new counties—Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown, Fingal, and South Dublin—and the City of Dublin, which has both county and city government powers. The Dáil also replaced city corporations with city councils as the administrative bodies in 2002. The Dublin Regional Authority coordinates the plans, reviews the budgets, and monitors the spending of EU funds by the three counties and Dublin City Council (formerly Dublin Corporation). The council is the largest local authority in Ireland, consisting of more than 50 councillors elected every five years by proportional representation. The council is led by a lord mayor chosen annually by the councillors from among themselves. The lord mayor chairs meetings, but the role is otherwise principally ceremonial; a city manager performs the executive functions. Through the Local Appointments Commission, the state’s Department of the Environment names the managers. Just under one-third of the Irish electorate lives in the Dublin Region’s 12 constituencies, which are represented by 47 members of the proportionally elected Dáil.

Municipal services

Police services are a national responsibility, and Ireland is divided into six police regions. The Dublin Metropolitan Region embraces the city, the whole of the Dublin Region, and small portions of County Kildare to the west and County Wicklow to the south.

The city is home to numerous parks. St. Stephen’s Green, first enclosed in the 1660s and laid out in 1880 in its present form with flower beds, trees, a lake, a fountain, a bandstand dating from 1887, and memorials to various Dubliners, is in the centre of the city. Immediately to the south are the Iveagh Gardens, perhaps the least known of Dublin’s parks. Landscaped in 1863, they include a maze, archery grounds, woodland, fountains, a grotto, and a cascade. The National Botanic Gardens in Glasnevin to the north of the city contain some 20,000 different plants.

The Dublin Fire Brigade is run by the city council on behalf of the three other local authorities in the urban area. The brigade also provides an emergency ambulance service for the Greater Dublin area, and several fire stations have ambulances that operate.

Health

In 2005 the Health Boards system responsible for providing national health care was abolished. In its place a Health Service Executive (HSE) was established. Dublin is divided into two HSE regions. The regions have their own public health ambulance service. There are several private ambulance services, including air ambulances. Dublin contains numerous public and private hospitals, including four university hospitals—the Mater Misericordiae, Beaumont, St. Vincent’s, and St. James’s. All have departments of international repute ranging from children’s care to transplants and diagnostics. The Mater is associated with University College Dublin and is the national centre for cardiothoracic surgery. Dublin’s Royal College of Surgeons is one of the five recognized colleges of the National University of Ireland. Beaumont Hospital, opened in 1987, is the principal undergraduate and postgraduate teaching and research centre associated with the Royal College, whose campus it shares. It is the national centre for neurosurgery. St. Vincent’s is the teaching hospital of University College Dublin and a leading biomedical research institute. St. James’s Hospital, which replaced several older hospitals, is associated with Trinity College and houses the Centre for Advanced Clinical Therapeutics, the Dementia Services Information and Development Centre, the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics, and the National Medicines Information Centre. St. Patrick’s Hospital, founded in 1746 by a bequest from Jonathan Swift, is a private psychiatric centre still functioning on its original site, just south of Heuston Station.

Education

Founded in 1592, Trinity College is Ireland’s oldest university, though most of its distinguished buildings date from the 18th century. It possesses the largest collection of publications in Ireland, including the early 9th-century Book of Kells and the mid-12th-century Book of Leinster, both lavishly illustrated religious manuscripts. For centuries Trinity was regarded as a bastion of the “Protestant Ascendancy” that governed and effectively owned and controlled most of Ireland. In fact, the college was among the most liberal in the British Isles. In the 18th century, while Roman Catholics were barred by law from taking degrees, they could still attend the college. The Catholic Relief Act (1793) enabled Catholics to take degrees but not to have full standing. All such religious exclusions were dropped in 1873. Nevertheless, Trinity remained almost exclusively Protestant until the Roman Catholic Church’s ban on attending was lifted in 1970.

University College Dublin, established as the Catholic University of Ireland in the 1850s and now a constituent college of the National University of Ireland, is the largest campus in Ireland, with more than 20,000 students. In 1940 Eamon de Valera founded the Institute for Advanced Studies with Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger (who became an Irish citizen) as the director of its School for Theoretical Physics. In 1989 the capital’s newest university, Dublin City University, was created from the National Institute for Higher Education. Also in the city are a number of other institutions of higher education, including colleges of technology, teacher-training colleges, and specialized vocational colleges.

Cultural life

Dublin played a leading role in the cultural renaissance that began in 1884 with the establishment of the Gaelic Athletic Association (Cumann Lúthchleas Gael) for the revival of historically Irish games. It was broadened in 1893 with the foundation of the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge), which promotes the Irish language and Irish folklore. The National Gallery, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Project Arts and City Arts centres, and many privately owned galleries reflect the liveliness of the visual arts in Dublin. Temple Bar has been developed with a mix of boutiques, galleries, and studios.

Literature, theatre, and music

At the centre of Ireland’s rich Anglo-Irish literary, philosophical, and political history, Greater Dublin was the birthplace of three winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature: playwrights Samuel Beckett and George Bernard Shaw and poet William Butler Yeats. Other notable figures associated with the city include the satirists Jonathan Swift and Brendan Behan, the poet and dramatist Oscar Wilde, the playwright Sean O’Casey, the political theorist Edmund Burke, and the novelist James Joyce, author of the renowned short-story collection Dubliners (1914) and of the groundbreaking novel Ulysses (1922), which presents a day in the life of Dublin in 1904 through three characters whose stories parallel events in Homer’s Odyssey. More recently, Dublin has provided the setting for the fiction of Maeve Binchy and Roddy Doyle.

Early in the 20th century, the cultural renaissance in Dublin continued with the opening of the famous Abbey Theatre, an enterprise associated particularly with the playwrights John Millington Synge and Augusta, Lady Gregory. In addition to producing their works, the Abbey later staged the first performances of major plays. The old theatre burned down in the early 1950s, but with government help a new theatre was opened in 1966; it houses both the main Abbey stage and the smaller, experimental Peacock Theatre. In 1928 Micheál MacLiammóir and Hilton Edwards started the renowned Gate Theatre Company, which continues to flourish. Orson Welles and James Mason began their acting careers there. The state-sponsored Arts Council, with headquarters in Dublin, subsidizes the Abbey, the Gate, and a number of small theatrical groups in the region.

Among the city’s main commercial theatres are the Gaiety, which stages annual opera seasons, and the Olympia. In 1980 the National Concert Hall was opened, finally giving the capital, after decades of unsuccessful attempts, a major concert venue. Radio Telefís Éireann, the national radio and television station, is also based in Dublin. It employs the country’s principal symphony orchestra. The city also has produced a number of internationally famous folk and pop musicians, including Finbar Furey, Sinéad O’Connor, the Boomtown Rats, and U2.

Publishing

The country’s principal book publishers, periodicals, and newspapers, including several evening, national daily, and Sunday papers, are based in Dublin. A number of small but influential literary and current affairs magazines are published, both in Irish and in English. Since the 1970s there has been an increase in the number of publishing houses devoted to literature, especially poetry.

Sports

Phoenix Park holds annual motor races. Horse racing flourishes at Leopardstown in South Dublin, about 6 miles (10 km) from the city centre, and at Fairyhouse, about 15 miles (24 km) from the city centre in County Meath. There is also a greyhound track at Harold’s Cross. The traditional Gaelic games of hurling and Gaelic football are played at Croke Park, on the north bank of the Royal Canal. International rugby and football (soccer) matches are held at Lansdowne Road, and Belfield at University College Dublin attracts major competitions. Golf is popular.